Authors Electric

   L.A. Times Newroom 1963, the day JFK was shot Once again, I dwell in the alternate history of a work to which I keep returning. Maybe it's a novel, maybe a novella, maybe a string of stories I'm trying to unravel. Meanwhile, what we call reality looks more and more like science fiction or a Borges reality. Indulging fatalism and its first cousin cynicism might be easier at my advanced age but for family. My concerns are both abstract — for humankind and our furry friends and real for the younger hopeful members of the mixed heritage and gender choice clan to which I belong. As I write this we await the momentary arrival of little Nora, who will be my fourth great grandchild, expected baby of my granddaughter Fiona Reynolds in San Francisco.  Granddaughter Fiona & mom Alicia    More than ever, I see us handing a shabby future to little Nora when we could have done — nay, we have to do — so much better. I always took the works of Margaret Atwood, William...

Cool cats Dear Santa, please could you send me a time machine, Doctor optional, although David Tennant would be a nice addition. He could pilot it for me. I want to go back to 1950s Leeds. Just for a little while. Oh, and I want to be a child again, so that I don't find it too much of a shock. But with just enough adult hindsight to be able to observe with a certain amount of clarity. And take notes.  Tall order, I know. The alternative, as I've discovered, may be a magical website called Leodis, which is one of the old names for the city. You can visit it here . I first discovered this wonderful site when my cousin sent me a link to it, and I must confess that back when I was working as a writing fellow for the Royal Literary Fund, I browsed it in between appointments whenever my students were late. It was ideal for filling in the odd five or ten minutes of free time, easy to click on a few photographs and just as easy to click off them again. Now I've bee...

Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end, when printing was industrial and newspapers weren't media because we never heard the word used that way. Editors chomped on cigars. Reporters rat-tat-tat-tatted on their Remingtons and Underwoods, cigarettes dangling from their lips, their white shirts open-collared and striped tie loosened. They'd yell, “boy!” when they ran out of copy paper, or were on a deadline and needed me to run their their hot sheets up to the city desk as they typed furiously. Teletype machines clattered incessantly in the glass-walled wire room – AP, UPI, Reuters, INS – spitting out news of the world by the ream. The copy boy – me – had to step lively to keep up. Armed with a straight-edged length of leading, I would tear off stories as the machines inched them out relentlessly – short and long – and sort them quickly – local, state, national, international – each destined for the wire basket of their respective editors, No. 2 p...

Some stories are so good they just rise to the surface like cream. It all started with a lunchtime conversation with a client from Rio . “I have a friend who has been trying to write his autobiography for years,” My client said, “can I put him in touch with you?” Gordon Lewis was an “unfortunate”, born in a home for unmarried mothers in 1950s Dublin . His mother was determined not to go into the Magdalene Laundries and risk losing her child, so she found a home run by Catholic nuns which would let him stay with her and kept him a secret from everyone, including her family. It wasn’t until he was eight years old that Gordon even realised he had any family apart from the other women and children in the home. Seeing that her spirited son was in danger of getting into serious trouble, running wild on the city streets, his mother took the decision of contacting Bill, the man who had been the love of her life before she fell pregnant by another man, in the hope that he wo...